Monthly archive: January, 2014

Following Michael Burawoy’s Annual Lecture for the Centre for the Study of Social and Global Justice (CSSGJ) on ‘Social Movements in the Neoliberal Age’, I thought it worth dusting off one of the threads in a recent article of mine that explores his wider project of Sociological Marxism. My article, entitled ‘The Limits of Sociological Marxism?’, was published last year in the journal Historical Materialism and can be downloaded here. It develops a sympathetic critique of Sociological Marxism, which has been fashioned by both Michael Burawoy and Erik Olin Wright. At the centrepiece of this project is a theory of capitalism as a particular form of class exploitation. An exploitation-centred and relational concept of class is thus presented, rooted in the social relations of production, and projected through the analysis of contemporary society. With class relations and the dynamics surrounding the reproduction and transformation of capitalist forms constituting a cornerstone of Sociological Marxism, there might seem to be little to disagree upon. What could therefore be contentious about Sociological Marxism?

Each year the Centre for the Study of Social and Global Justice (CSSGJ) at the University of Nottingham hosts a major event in the form of its Annual Lecture, which was delivered last week by Professor Michael Burawoy from the University of California, Berkeley. Previous CSSGJ Annual Lectures have included, since 2006, David Harvey, Gerald Cohen, Hilary Wainwright, Philip McMichael, Siba Grovogui, Samir Amin, and Leo Panitch and Sam Gindin. It was an honour to host Michael Burawoy, a figure that consistently breaks the boundaries of public sociology by contributing to understanding class politics, postcolonialism, social movements, and globalisation “from below”. His lecture, available below and entitled ‘Social Movements in the Neoliberal Age’, was a major statement on the wave of social movements that have unfolded since 2010. What were the main themes that arose in his lecture in tracing social movements under neoliberalisation?

During our time at the University of Nottingham, Andreas Bieler and I have collaborated in forming the Marxism Reading Group within the School of Politics and International Relations at the University of Nottingham, which started in 2006. The group has retained a continued presence ever since, made up of staff and postgraduate research students, meeting each Wednesday afternoon in term time to discuss collectively chosen texts. As a result, some 25 texts have been read to date covering a range of Marxist classics, past and present. The group has been a key collective project shaping spaces of self-development within an ever more market-driven higher education sector. Most recently, the collective enterprise of the reading group has been successful in realising a co-authored journal article stemming from our reading of The Accumulation of Capital by Rosa Luxemburg, which celebrated its centenary publication in 2013. The article is entitled ‘The Enduring Relevance of Rosa Luxemburg’s The Accumulation of Capital’ and will be published in the Journal of International Relations and Development, available later this year. How did we go about realising this publication between eight co-authors including ourselves and our PhD students Sümercan Bozkurt, Max Crook, Peter Cruttenden, Ertan Erol, Cemal Burak Tansel, and Elif Uzgören?

As an update, I want to draw attention to some developments in relation to one of the initiatives that I have been shaping with colleagues at my new institution in the Department of Political Economy at the University of Sydney, specifically Damien Cahill, Martijn Konings, and Stephen Castles, in relation to the launch of an international workshop later this year focusing on both Karl Polanyi and Friedrich Hayek. This is hopefully the first of a series of new initiatives in political economy at the University of Sydney with additional events including further forthcoming workshops, a major 2015 anniversary conference marking 40 years of the emergence of political economy at the University of Sydney, and new appointments. Those developments are all to come. For now, though, why hold a workshop on the work of both Karl Polanyi and Friedrich Hayek in 2014?

With all of the kerfuffle in the UK academic world about open access journals−meaning without legal or financial barriers to gain access to publically-funded academic work−and the fudge underway to resolve this in the interests of publishers, Andreas Bieler and I are delighted to announce a new article of ours now available in the Journal of Australian Political Economy (JAPE). This journal publishes peer-reviewed articles and is fully open access. The latest issue includes the annual E. L. Wheelwright Lecture by Susan George, articles on urban political economy, and our joint article on recasting contemporary geopolitics, territorial processes of capitalist accumulation, and spaces of imperialist rivalry. Our article is entitled ‘The will-o’-the-wisp of the transnational state’ and can be freely accessed here.